


Nothing Like Two Girls Sticking Together

by TrenchcoatRats



Series: Nancy/Maggie Agenda [1]
Category: A Nightmare on Elm Street (Movies 1984-1994), A Nightmare on Elm Street - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Nightmare 3 Compliant, i just think they're Neat and they would be good friends/girlfriends, me holding maggie and nancy up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22997134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrenchcoatRats/pseuds/TrenchcoatRats
Summary: Nancy laughs and Maggie thinks she falls a little bit in love.Or: Maggie and Nancy go to the same university, meet, and catch feelings.
Relationships: Nancy Thompson/Maggie Burroughs | Kathryn Krueger
Series: Nancy/Maggie Agenda [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1810369
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Nothing Like Two Girls Sticking Together

It’s finals week when Maggie meets Nancy. She’s in her second to last semester, worried to the point of insomnia about her abnormal psychology course. If she fails this exam, it could and would throw off all of her plans for graduating in the spring. She’d done her part to try to pass, gone to almost every class and done every assignment and extra credit opportunity, but when her professor spends most of the class getting distracted about the different birds outside their classroom window and talking about the latest goings on in the news, it makes it very difficult for anything to get done. 

Needless to say, Maggie had spent the whole of the last month living almost exclusively on the campus library’s fifth floor. She’d get off class, walk up there, work until she started to fall asleep, make a pillow out of her jacket, and wake up three hours later to finish studying. Far from a sustainable way to study, let alone live. But she had chosen her bed when she picked psychology as her major, now she was going to lie in it, no matter how many nails the bed had in it.

On a particularly awful night, she stumbles out of the library half awake right into the coffee shop next door. There’s only a few students in there, and only one person working behind the counter. She looks like a student, with her thich brown hair pulled back but puffed out in the back. It’s not until Maggie fumbles her way through an order of whatever will keep her up that she notices the streak of white in the barista’s hair. And when she’s handed her coffee and told to take it easy, she catches a glimpse of a name tag that reads: Nancy.

She keeps coming back after that, whenever she needs a break from studying, from the atmosphere of the library. It’s always in the early hours of the morning when she comes in and it’s always Nancy behind the counter. After the second time she comes in, she starts talking to her aside from polite conversation.

“You always get the graveyard shifts it seems, your coworkers hate you that much?” Maggie asks wryly as she’s handed her coffee. Nancy jolts slightly in surprise.

“Oh no, not at all. I sign up for the shifts and they all appreciate it a lot.” She smiles at Maggie and Maggie grins back.

“But don’t you have finals you’ve got to worry about?”

“Sure I do, but who sleeps anymore?” Nancy says wryly. Maggie laughs in agreement.

“What’s your major anyway? I’m in my senior year for psych.”

Nancy lights up. “Me too!” She pauses for a second, as if suddenly unsure. “I could be totally wrong, but aren’t you in my abnormal psych class? I normally sit in the back so I’m not sure or anything, but I think you’ve passed my row leaving a couple times.”

Maggie takes a second to think about it, but she’s not positive either. She thinks she may have seen a girl with the same hairstyle as Nancy a few times, the empty desk next to her a graveyard for soda cans and coffee. Whether that’s Nancy or not, she’s not sure, but regardless her coping mechanisms for getting through the class are beyond impressive and relatable. She shrugs at Nancy apologetically.

“Sorry, I’ve got an awful memory when it comes to faces. But we should study together sometime, while we still have the hope of passing.”

Nancy laughs and Maggie thinks she falls a little bit in love.

“I’d love that, I’ll need all the help I can get on this. Listen, I get off at eight. Lemme get back to my room and crash for a few hours and we can grab a study room or something? If that works for you.”

Maggie takes a second before offering an alternative. “We can use my apartment, if you’d like. Fewer people, no risk about being kicked out if we get in a zone.”

Nancy nods in agreement. “Pick me up around noon?”

Maggie internally winces at how tired she’d be if she was running on that little sleep, but maybe Nancy was used to it. “Sounds like a plan.”

Nancy grabs Maggie’s hand across the counter and squeezes it once. “It’s a date then.” She beams. Maggie's heart flips as she grins back.

It’s two years later when Maggie gets a call about Nancy. Not a call from Nancy, the calls that would drag early into the morning, where Nancy couldn’t sleep and Maggie would talk to her about her day, what she was working on, anything and everything she could say to help Nancy relax until all the reply Maggie got was quiet breathing that would, more often than not to her eternal worry, hitch into a cry as Nancy fell into another nightmare. But on the good nights, the nights when Nancy would laugh at Maggie’s lame jokes and throw in anecdotes of her own, when they would make up plans to meet for a dinner, movie, _brunch_ even that would send the two into hysterics as they got more and more elaborate, the nights where Maggie fell asleep with the phone pressed into her cheek so tightly that she came into work the next day with red marks on her face, their own version of a hickey, she joked to Nancy once.

No, this call was about Nancy. About what happened to Nancy. How she had gotten an internship at a counseling facility her senior year of college, working with kids who had some kind of shared sleep disorder. Nancy never mentioned it to her, but Maggie knows that Nancy felt at least some sense of kinship with the kids, that she felt that the nightmares and terror that haunted her waking and restless sleeping hours were just as bad for these kids, that she would do anything to help in whatever way so that no one had to go through what she’s gone through, what she’s been going through. As Maggie listens to the voice on the other end tell her that Nancy had been found dead at the facility, and that according to paperwork Nancy filed that _Maggie_ was her next of kin, she holds back a sound-maybe a scream, maybe a sob, maybe even a laugh. If Nancy wasn’t dead, laying in a pool of her own blood somewhere so far from Maggie to hold her one last time, she would have punched her for not telling her. 

Maggie tugs on the phone’s cord, wrapping it tighter and tighter around her wrist as the voice just keeps talking on and on, not even pretending that they care about how Maggie feels about having to hear about her friend, her long distance, somewhat _girlfriend_ being dead, apparently murdered. She can imagine it too, unnaturally clear in her mind. Nancy, cautious but confident, expecting to be safe, only to be proved violently wrong. She’d be laying there, dead at the hands of some man, tall and looming over her body. Maggie _knows_ that Nancy was killed at the mental facility, so why does the smell of flowers sink into every detail she comes up with? With one last twist, she yanks the cord out of the phone and is left with a throbbing wrist, no Nancy, and the cloying smell of flowers constricting her throat, making it impossible to speak and just as difficult to breathe.

Maggie sinks to the floor, grabbing onto her hair with her hands, the phone clattering to the floor and splintering into pieces. It’s not like it matters. Nancy isn’t around to pick up the phone and if her parents wanted her attention, they knew how to get it. At the thought of Nancy’s name, she grips her hair tightly, uncaring of the pain, of how strongly it contrasted from the gentle combing motions Nancy would do when they would be stretched out on Maggie’s couch, watching late night reruns and the way the light flickered and framed each other’s faces.

After a minute of pained breathing, what feels like an eternity of cloying nothingness weighing her down until there’s nothing left of Maggie herself, she’s able to open her eyes, even though she wants nothing more than to keep them shut and never open them, never realize the reality she has to face.

But when she opens them and gets a direct view of the shelf almost exactly across from her, she's confronted with that reality. She's surrounded by picture, pictures of her with her parents at her high school graduation, that stupid cat hair clip she’d had since her parents adopted her and the picture that served as its origin story, the only picture from her biological family, that had a toddler Maggie dressed as a black cat for Halloween, beaming up at the camera and showing off her cat nose and whiskers. The caption read, “The cutest black Kat’s third Halloween!” When Nancy came to her college apartment and saw it for the first time, she had laughed for two minutes straight before agreeing that Maggie “really was the cutest cat.” 

The last picture hurts the most. It’s Nancy and Maggie on the day of Maggie’s college graduation. Nancy had her arms wrapped around Maggie’s shoulders, leaning her head against Maggie and grinning proudly, the ever present bags under her eyes completely hidden with the brightness of her smile. Maggie holds a bouquet of flowers that Nancy had surprised her with, smiling gently. Not even thirty seconds after the picture had been taken, she sneezes so hard she drops the whole bouquet. Nancy had prodded her into pressing some of the flowers so she could keep them “snot and all." They were gently taped around the borders of the picture, making the whole scene look like it had been taken in a garden. 

It’s that last picture, ironically, that knocks the smell of flowers from Maggie’s throat, allowing her to let out a quiet, wounded sound as she’s unable to look away from it. She slowly rocks her body back and forth, alternating the strength of her grip on her hair while she’s unable to look from it. She doesn’t think about Nancy’s now-cold body, or any depth of the news she had been told. Instead she looks at their happy smiles, forever content and in love, frozen in time. Maggie doesn’t cry, but that doesn’t lessen the intensity of her grief, as she sits alone in her apartment with her broken phone, broken heart, and the weight of the past all around her.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there, letting her grief and sorrow press in on her. But at some point she gets up and has a coffee mug filled with cold water in front of her. The mug is one that Nancy had bought for her at a thrift shop; it’s chipped at the top, filled in with purple glitter glue that’s smeared across a very ugly artistic depiction of a cat. Nancy said it had character, Maggie had said it was straight out of a bad dream. She takes a long drink from the mug without looking at the design now.

Whatever it was that Nancy had been going through, it had scarred her, but left her with the strong desire to help other kids who were suffering, even if it wasn’t in the same way she had suffered. Finishing off her drink, Maggie can’t think of a better way to honor Nancy’s memory than to do the same. And maybe to keep the ugly cat mug.

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday to me!! and happy birthday to every other hero who's written f/f fic in this tag. i love and appreciate you All


End file.
